Path of Exile launches expansion The Fall of Oriath today

The free-to-play Path of Exile [official site], Adam’s favourite action-RPG, will launch its ‘The Fall of Oriath’ expansion tonight. This is a big’un, adding Act Five to finish the story and whacking in five more acts based on the regular five to replace the higher difficulty levels. That’s a whole lot of monstermashing. The update is due to go live at 9pm so why am I telling you now? 1) Because I hope to have finished work before then. 2) Pre-loading has begun. 3) Because the huge v3.0.0 patch notes are now live so clickheads can spend the next six hours poring over them.Act Five, The Fall of Oriath, will send players back to the land they were exiled from in the first place. “Caught amidst the slaves revolting against their Templar oppressors, you are all that stands between the innocent lives trapped in Oriath and the divine wrath of High Templar Avarius,” Grinding Gear Games explain.

After that, players will be sent into Part Two. Replacing the ‘Cruel’ and ‘Merciless’ difficulty levels, Part Two revisits the five acts to see how they’ve changed since you first swept through. They’ll visit some new parts of the lands, while some familiar areas will be changed by what you did.

Another big feature of the expansion is the ‘Pantheon’ system, which lets players beat up gods to earn godlike powers. Nice. And obviously Fall of Oriath also adds new enemies, items, skills, and all that other action-RPG stuff.

If you want to get in and start crushing Act Five as soon as possible, you can download most of it in advance. That’s for the standalone client, mind, not the version on Steam.